Modern Lessons From Medieval History 3
Created | Updated Nov 20, 2011
Part 3. THE MARRIAGE OF LEGITIMACY AND WEALTH
By the end of the Middle Ages much could be achieved by wealth as was demonstrated by the magnificent Medici Court in Florence and those prestigious courts of an Eastern Europe. In Italy the Medici family had produced Popes and was well on the way to producing a Queen of France. But neither the Medici Popes nor Catherine de Medici, Queen of France, would be called saints.
THE ROOTS OF THE MEDICI
Previte Orton traces the roots of the Medici family’s wealth to their role as bankers for the Papacy, collecting the Pope’s revenues from the Church in England. For, though the sacrament of holy investiture bound individual clergymen and monks to poverty that was only in their personal capacity. All parts of the Church claimed an inalienable right to its revenues and its properties. So,for example, when members of the Franciscan Order of travelling friars finally tried to emulate the example of their inspiration, St. Francis of Assisi, they quickly got into trouble. Genuinely embracing poverty they were quite happy to perform for free services for which members of the laity were normally required to pay. Pressure from the Church establishment divided the “spiritualists” off from the rest, and once divided off they could be effectively suppressed.
But just as much of “a sure thing” as the revenues of the Papacy in Europe, when commerce and industry picked up, were the English wool crop and the demand for this “Golden Fleece” in the textile towns of Flanders and Tuscany. So the Medici cleverly used the Pope’s revenues in England to buy up English wool. Sacks of wool were less vulnerable in transit than gold coins and, moreover, as English East India merchants worked out in the eighteenth century, very little ‘added-value’ is achieved by moving bullion across vast distances. English wool, on the other hand, could be bought from the producers and sold to the manufacturers at a good profit. The purchase price was the Pope's money and the "value-added" was the Medici's income. And by the end of the twelfth century people were trading in “Futures” with the great Cistercian monasteries of Yorkshire able to sell their wool crop ten years in advance.
THE RE-EMERGENCE OF THE CITY
Meanwhile in the regions, where the wool was turned into textiles, urban capitalist society began to emerge. And even the smaller market towns that were springing up all over the place, including those founded by German pioneers in the “wild east”, had the effect of making towns disproportionately important in the conduct of affairs. Towns by definition meant trading goods and that meant making money.
In England the early growth of the Parliamentary system with its borough and county MP’s reveals the closer relationship between the borough representatives and the Crown than the county ones. The boroughs were always looking out for new ways to create wealth, and were prepared to pay the Crown for new legal rights and charters either as direct fees or in new forms of taxation. If small market towns and ports, however, could supply a regular flow of money, the centre of a great industry like Florence at the heart of the Tuscan textile trade could produce families like the Medici with vast sums of money that they could lend to monarchs, and would-be monarchs, in spite of the Usury Laws that theoretically banned the charging of interest.
With the increasingly important role played by money, what and who it could buy, there was a shift away from qualitative difference. For, though you pay more for “top quality”, unless that difference in quality can be quantified, it becomes irrelevant. How much for regal, majestic, noble, heroic, pious or divine?
As Sir Robert Walpole was to say much later-“Every man has his price”, and the market economy does not really deal with quality except to link it with quantity. Top quality costs you more of the same. Moreover, a market works through ‘cash on delivery’, which means that both parties have to identify tangible targets and goals. And, if there were those who declined to abandon intangible ideas like virtue, honour, and brotherhood, there were others more versed in ‘the ways of the world’. So, for example, the Hundred Years War between France and England, and the frequent wars between the Italian city-states, increasingly involved professional units of soldiers, who were prepared to fight for any cause for material gain. And when there was no fighting employment the mercenaries looted and terrorised regions, a favourite haunt being the attractive region around Avignon. In Italy Lodovico Sforza of Milan became the most famous of the “condottieri”, a general with his own army for hire, and rich and famous enough for Leonardo da Vinci to write to him asking to be hired as a universal genius able to do anything as well as any man- works of art, weapons of war, carnivals and festivals, feats of engineering.
SEEDS OF REVOLT
Even those elective processes, in which some qualitative considerations of character and potential could or should come into the equation, became distorted by access to wealth. When Martin Luther launched his attack on Tetzel’s sale of indulgences in 1517, probably everyone who understood how the Church worked in those days guessed that a good proportion of the money was not going to help in the building of a new St. Peter’s in Rome at all. A north German bishop, who had only recently been appointed, needed to pay back the bankers who had funded his campaign to get this lucrative position. It would be lucrative that is after he had given the first year’s income to the Pope. But Church revenues were still pretty reliable and could be banked upon.
Other “great expectations” against which people borrowed money were, however, more risky and financiers had to learn the new trade. Hence there was a great crisis in Florence between 1343 and 1346 when the banking houses of Bardi, Peruzzi, and others failed because Edward III of England, having borrowed heavily to pay for his campaigns to win the French throne, repudiated his debts with them totalling almost £450,000. As a result there was a stoppage of production and unemployment in Florence, which may have weakened the city because, when the Black Death arrived a couple of years later, it carried off nearly two thirds of the population,about twice the overall European mortality rate for this first outbreak of the plague. And the results were to lead to a major crisis.
As happened in many countries, after so many workers had died of the plague, the authorities in Florence tried to resist the operation of Supply and Demand, which under free market conditions would have raised wage levels. There were strikes and outbreaks of violence that culminated in June-July 1378, when the lowest level of workers, “the ragbags”, took over the city, robbing and burning for three days. They set up three new guilds to represent their interests alongside the other guilds in the ‘Signoria’, a body that had been created in 1343 as a form of municipal democracy. But the traders just shut up their shops in self-protection and eventually the revolution collapsed when “the ragbags” faced starvation.
“During the next forty years the Florence of the guilds gradually became the Florence of the Medici. The forms remained and a kind of republic existed but it must be understood that the proletariat, although it shared in the great prosperity of Tuscany, had not improved its political or constitutional position in the slightest degree. From 1402, or perhaps more precisely from 1434, the history of Florence for almost a century is the history of the benevolent despotism of the Medici family.” (page 233)
BENEVOLENT DESPOTISM
In 1963 the experience of moving on from abortive revolution by “the ragbags” to the gay serenity, festivity and self-congratulation of Medici Florence had relevance to the lessons that Western politicians had drawn from the Age of Catastrophe 1914-45, with its the revival of the Age of Revolution.
In his 1965 volume "Bismarck and Modern Germany" W.N. Medlicott referred to the Iron Chancellor's pioneering steps towards a Welfare State as "Benevolent despotism", for Bismarck was no politician but a minister of the Crown within a State system in which parliaments had no power. It seemed that sharing in great prosperity and a sense of being carried along a "tide in the affairs of man" was more important to “ragbags” than improving their political and constitutional position by means of Right Wing or Left Wing revolution.
The Marshall Plan had summed up the policy to be applied to European Reconstruction. It was not aimed at any political ideology, and hence could avoid confrontation and argument with ideologues. The first task was to just make sure that the material needs of the masses were looked after. And, in the aftermath of wartime unity, wealth deployed in “benevolent despotism” would be enough to defuse the smouldering discontent of the "proletariat".
And it worked domestically and internationally. For, after the death of Stalin, the Cold War thawed and the USSR, the leader of the global Communist movement, accepted peaceful co-existence and competition between Capitalist West and Communist East. But in some ways it was a competition between two ideals- a Western ‘quantity of life’ that was available right now and a Communist ‘quality of life’ in some distant future. But benevolent despotism meant that the Western citizen could "Live now. Pay later" enjoying the credit-worthy status of citizens legally entitled to simple rights within conditions of benevolent despotism.
During the Fifties a post-war USA showed the world a “Happy Days” shop window of what American culture had to offer even the common man compared to the wild communist dreams of creating a higher, nobler and altruistic form of Civilization, most notably through the output of Hollywood and the new TV studios.
But was it enough? The 1961 feature film “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”, in which Audrey Hepburn played a young woman addicted to window shopping at the exclusive New York jewellery shop, touched a real nerve with the public. Somehow in “A Nun’s Story” the idea of such a beautiful young woman renouncing the world in order to enter a closed order had seemed tragic. But the desperate levity of Miss Golightly had its own tragic sense of flight and fantasy in a shallow and mercenary big city environment. “We’re heading for the same rainbow’s end.. Waiting round the bend..My Huckleberry friend, Moon River and me”.
BRIGHT LIGHTS BIG CITY- CELESTIAL OR BESTIAL
In his 1969 TV series “Civilisation” Kenneth Clark chose scenes of New York to introduce his final chapter on “Heroic Materialism”: “It’s godless, it’s brutal, it’s violent- but one can’t laugh it off, because in the energy, strength of will and mental grasp that have gone to make New York, materialism has transcended itself…It took almost the same time to reach its present condition as it did to complete the Gothic cathedrals…So many of the same human ingredients have gone into its construction that at a distance it does look rather like a celestial city. At a distance. Come closer and it’s not so good. Lots of squalor, and, in the luxury, something parasitical”. (page 219)
The city had come a long way from the age of stone castles and churches in the secure shadow of which towns and cities grew surrounded by the strong and silent walls that gave a sense of protection and the possibility of imposing Christian Civilization within at least this space. Kenneth Clark’s New York is a triumphant attempt to house and contain human activity in all its best and worst forms, for, as Lord Clark said, nature is violent and brutal, and the nearby Ellis Island was established as a receiving station for the flotsam and jetsam of the Old World coming to the New World to pursue the American Dream of a new start.
So the city became just a great melting pot container from which some of the successful might eventually emerge to go to set up home in some suburban land of “Little Boxes”. In a way it was an Anglo-Saxon dream of a land where there was no need for monarchs, or nobles or an established Church and where legitimacy and wealth were potentially part of those “inalienable rights” that came from “the Creator” and were not man made at all.
For it was in England that the circumstances had been most favourable for the effective marriage of legitimacy and wealth, and they had created what felt like “a tide in the affairs of man” that had swept Great Britain towards world domination.
Thanks to the constitutional tradition that included the Coronation Oath, the Magna Carta and the Westminster Parliament, it was in England that the tendency for despotic monarchy to develop into absolute monarchy and Divine Right was checked by the traditions of the rights of the people and the duties of the Crown. And the “the Eleven Years Tyranny” of Charles I showed that, while Kings who acted as if they were above the law were very detrimental to the kind of legitimacy and security that bankers look for, the Parliamentarians knew that eventually the King would need them and their cooperation in providing money.
It was the Glorious Bloodless Revolution of 1688-9 that showed a real balance of power had been established between Crown and Parliament. Moreover, it made it very apparent that the real legitimacy of the monarch came from the approval of Parliament, which thereby was really bound to provide the funds that the chosen monarchs needed to do their job. ‘Their’ for in this case there was the kind of pragmatic compromise with which English government came to be associated. In 1688-9 Parliament and the prospective monarchs decided on a certainly rare if not unique enthronement of a joint King and Queen. Perhaps part of the success of the whole venture came from the fact that William of Orange, who became William III of England, brought with him the fruits of the Dutch tradition of elective monarchy since, in his native United Netherlands, he had been chosen to be the “Stadholder” in the country that had pioneered a new era of global trade and finance and some of this expertise flowed into England with him.
Shortly after the revolution the Bank of England was set up with the beginnings of the National Debt that was to prove vitally important as William brought England into his Grand Alliance against the Grand Design of Louis XIV to make himself master of Europe. Lending money to a King of England was now low risk and therefore low interest. Lending money to the absolutist French monarch was neither. And in the ongoing wars between the two countries the better financial situation of the British Crown was to prove vitally important, with the financial instutions of the City of London and the port of London launched on the trajectory that made London the entrepot of the global economy by the end of the Nineteenth Century.
THE OUTREACH OF LEGITIMACY AND WEALTH
Meanwhile the English nobility had already achieved a new level of legitimacy and security. When the Civil War and Commonwealth removed the King, the feudal overlord, all the feudal ties to the King fell into abeyance. Then, when the Crown was restored, these feudal tenures direct from the Crown were not restored. The nobility now held their estates freehold with the right to dispose of them at will, with whatever elective element that had been a factor in aristocratic succession now removed.
It was to take 200 years or so for the process of then undoing all the lower levels of feudal ties downwards from the former “tenants in chief” to be completed. But nevertheless very soon England saw the consequences of a situation in which landowners could sell their ‘real estate’ or even better use it as collateral for loans from the country banks that sprang up all over the country in the eighteenth century. Rather differently to Lorenzo Medici, labelled “the Magnificent”, they began the remodelling of England by means of investment and improvement so that England was transformed into a very English “work of art”.
As more than one foreign observer noted, the whole of England became like a pretty garden, with the kind of scenes that continue to charm foreign tourists and those who just experience that charm vicariously through mansion house dramas like the ever popular screen adaptations of the works of Jane Austen and Agatha Christie. Each of those English lady novelists of enduring popularity, however, brings out the way that questions of legitimacy, ownership, property and wealth came to assume such an apparently vice-like grip on people’s lives that sometimes only really desperate measures seemed to offer a way out, in the case of Agatha Christie usually murder.
The vice-like grip was a historical reality. In the late eighteenth century the long tragedy of the handloom weavers began in the Indian cotton industry. The popularity of Indian cotton goods in Britain and Europe had initially been good for the Bengal cotton industry, and in spite of British restrictions on the import of cotton cloth, Europe was still a good import market for “muslin”. Over time, however, the market price of cotton goods declined and the Indian weavers found themselves with legally binding contracts that obliged them to work for the East India Company for impossibly low wages. Allegedly the desperate way-out that was taken by some weavers was to cut off their thumbs in order to make weaving a physical impossibility. Fifty years later it was British handloom weavers who suffered from the gradual triumph of the power loom.
Perhaps in that era of the increasing extension of the idea of unrestricted rights of ownership and binding legitimacy the most shocking legal judgement was that of Lord Chief Justice Mansfield in the “Zong” affair, when he said that, “though it shocks one to have to say it”, according to the terms of the contract between the Zong’s owners and their insurers, the ship’s captain had a legal right to treat the slaves on board as if they were horses, and therefore to throw them into the Atlantic to drown. In law the insurers had to pay up according to their contractual obligations.
The verdict in the ‘Zong’ affair created a new phase in Britain’s relationship with legitimacy, for the public outrage inspired the Anti-Slave trade campaign. For the first time a campaign deliberately strove to foster widespread moral indignation amongst the reading public in order to bring about a change the law. And during the nineteenth century legitimacy and the power of Parliament to make new laws binding on all citizens gradually became a major focus of political life, and increasingly the preferred way to change things by employing the coercive powers of the State to impose new laws and to raise new taxes.
STATE AND SOCIETY- MARRIAGE OR COHABITATION
In his “Principles of Social and Political Theory” published in 1951 Sir Ernest Barker wrote: “The State employs the method of coercion or compulsion: its purpose of declaring and enforcing a scheme of law and order makes the method necessary: and the unity of its organization makes the method possible. Society uses the method of voluntary action and the process of persuasion: the nature of its purposes can be satisfied, and is best satisfied, by that method; and the multiplicity of its organization, which enables men to choose and relinquish freely their membership of its various groups, enables them also to escape coercion by any group should coercion be attempted”. (page 43- 44)
He went on: “Distinctions of thought are always clearer than differences of fact. In fact, and in actual life, there is always a ‘margin of imprecision’. The State, if it is coercive, has also a voluntary aspect, at any rate under a democratic system of government by virtue of which each citizen lays his mind alongside other minds in a voluntary process of common debate and mutual persuasion. Conversely, social groups, though voluntary in their nature, may assume coercive power, as churches no less than trade unions have done in the course of history.” (page 44)
It seemed logical to Professor Barker, however, to assert that in general: “it may be argued [that] there must have been society of some sort-some voluntary habit of living together and ‘sticking together’- before men could develop a system of conscious self-organization in terms of law. From this point of view Society is anterior to the State: the naturally given fact of Society precedes, if it does not produce, the consciously created fact of the State.” (page 48)
And Dorothy Whitelock’s volume 2 of “The Pelican History of England”, entitled “The Beginnings of English Society” develops the idea that in England people were conscious of being part of a Society before they became part of a State. So Professor Barker could go on to argue that- “In England, at any rate, the interaction [of State and Society] has been mutually beneficial; and in particular the presence of a settled State, which we have enjoyed since the Revolution of 1688 (and even that was an agreed transaction rather than a ‘revolution’), has been favourable, on the whole, to the existence and action of voluntary social formations, ranging from voluntary hospitals, voluntary educational societies, and voluntary companies (whether or no they are called companies) such as Lloyd’s and the Stock Exchange, to free churches, trade unions, and even political parties..” (page 49)
But in a very real way these developments were made possible by the way that this “settled State” proved conducive to the secure and clear ownership of legal rights to property and wealth and the way that consequently “progress” had assumed a natural tendency to accentuate those advantages.
In 1807, in the midst of the Napoleonic War, when Britain was undergoing English ‘revolutionary’ change in order to hold off and defeat the greatest-ever threat from France, Parliament gave urgent consideration to the question of Poor Law Reform. And Samuel Whitbread made a number of proposals including giving extra voting power in vestry meetings, probably the most important place for “common debate” about the lives of the common people. Whitbread proposed that those assessed at £100 should have two votes, those at £150 three votes, and those at £400 four votes. As a journalist and pamphleteer William Cobbett attacked the proposals in his ‘Political Register’:
“Many of those who pay rates are but a step or two from pauperism themselves and they are the most likely persons to consider duly the important duty of doing, in the case of relief, what they would be done unto.. Besides, as the law now stands, though every parishioner has a vote in vestry, must it not be evident, to every man who reflects, that a man of large property and superior understanding will have weight in proportion? That he will, in fact, have many votes? If he play the tyrant, even little men will rise against him, and it is right they should have the power so doing: but, while he conducts himself with moderation and humanity, while he behaves as he ought to do to those who are beneath him in point of property, there is no fear but he will have a sufficiency of weight at every vestry. The votes of the inferior persons in the parish are, in reality dormant, unless in cases where some innovation, or some act of tyranny, is attempted. They are, like the sting of the bee, weapons merely of defence”. ( Quoted Hammonds ‘The Village Labourer “ Vol I page 178)
In 1818, however, an Act was passed giving an extra vote for every ratepayer worth £50, and additional votes for each additional £25. The next year another law gave parishes the right to appoint a Select Vestry with powers to direct just how the local overseer should implement the poor law, and in these hard times this was very often done with a view to keeping costs and rates as low as possible. For these were hard times of post-war depression reflected in much lower values compared to Whitbread’s suggestions in 1807.
The dramatic depth of the post-war economic depression was especially severe in agriculture generally and in industrial Lancashire both of which had enjoyed boom times during the war. In 1815, faced with the prospect of renewed imports of cereals, Parliament passed the Corn Laws to limit imports and the collapse of English agriculture. This measure came to be seen as Cobbett’s ‘men of property and superior understanding’ using the powers of Parliament in a self-interested way, and moreover peacetime had brought cruel repression by the State through new legislation that violated an English tradition of ‘sticking together’. In many ways this 1815-21 period proved to be “The Making of the Working Class” and, when the Great Reform Act of 1832 took away the votes of the common man in those rare ‘popular boroughs’ of England and introduced a new systematic right to vote linked to property ownership, it heralded “The Triumph of the Middle Classes”.
GREAT BRITAIN- A MARRIAGE MADE ON EARTH
But then, as Kenneth Clark said, even nature was being seen as violent and brutal, and by this time just about all men of property had acknowledged the need to pursue “superior understanding” of those “laws of nature” that, as Florence Nightingale was later to explain in a work written to enlighten the misguided artisans of England, seemed to be everywhere and were the best proof that there could be of a great law giver. God’s laws rather than popular opinions and old-fashioned English common sense were to guide the new age.
The "benevolent despotism" of Medici Florence was just one part of a Europe of despotic monarchies, including the Papacy, by Dr. Orton's classification. The struggle for world or European domination by Spain and then France had been resisted by England, but in the struggle England had evolved from the Anglo-Saxon Society/State into just part of Great Britain, a region with no social coherence.
In many ways the key moment had been the end of the Seven Years War in 1763 with the recently crowned George III heading a government with unprecedented global responsibilities from North America to the Indian sub-continent. It was a challenging situation which almost two decades later made Parliament pass Dunning's resolution that "The influence of the Crown has increased, is increasing and ought to be diminished".
By then the British Crown was fighting a losing battle against the American colonists who used the emerging concepts of inalienable rights, that is a legitimacy higher than that of the Crown. But by the same token it was higher than the common people and could equally be used to justify despotic rule like that of Bismarck or later twentieth century totalitarian states.
For parallel with the work of the experts in the laws of men, other experts had looked with fresh eyes and a developing scientific method at the works of Nature. They revealed that the whole of Creation too operated according to laws, with ignorance of the Nature’s law liable to produce catastrophic results. The challenge to Western Civilization, therefore, was to achieve a state of perfection in the laws of men so that Humankind might profit from the bounties inherent within the Natural order: for an understanding of the “laws of Nature” made it possible to navigate successfully through the challenges and changes of life.
So, for example, the industrial revolution during the French Wars of 1793-1815 was the triumphant period for the Boulton and Watt steam engine, inspired by a conversation between James Watt and Professor of Science at Greenock University about the laws of latent heat. Matthew Boulton, exclaimed that their firm sold what everyone wanted- “power”. Consequently the power-revolution based on fossil fuels was crucial in the process of either supplementing or replacing human skill, creativity, and muscle power with technology. But what were to be the implications of this added power for ordinary life and society?
In the midst of those wars Thomas Robert Malthus outlined the implication of the laws of mathematics that show that geometric progression is faster than arithmetical progression: and therefore using the wealth of the country in such a way as to promote population growth was the wrong message. In Nature populations have an inbuilt tendency to grow faster than their food supply, and, if not checked by “Moral Restraint”, inevitably “Natural Checks” will come into operation- the disasters of war, famine and disease. Consequently ‘Malthusianism’ had a great impact on the way that the newly empowered Middle Classes set out to navigate Britain away from Hard Times in the 1830’s. The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 ended the centuries old English tradition of Poor Relief and ‘sticking together’ despite the desperate campaigning of William Cobbett. But as The Times obituary commented a few years later, he was just one man, a lone voice, not joined to any interest or faction. Just, as G.K. Chesterton commented after the First World War, someone who campaigned for "the little man".
The whole initial era of Middle Class empowerment after 1832 has been called “the age of laissez-faire” because there was a great emphasis on reducing the level of State intervention and reducing costs as far as possible. Thus Beatrice Webb, one of the great architects of the Welfare State, recalled how, as a daughter being trained to be able to deal with domestic staff and tradesmen, it was drilled into her by her mother that you should always know the market price and never pay any more than that. To do so was not even a kindness because it weakened the servants and tradesmen’s ability to cope with the real world. It was an environment in which Darwin’s laws of progress through evolution saw the way ahead as being shaped by a brutal struggle for ‘the Survival of the Fittest’, though it made very uncomfortable reading for those who liked to think of themselves as benign and Christian agents of a loving God. "This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you. But I do know best".
By the end of the Middle Ages much could be achieved by wealth as was demonstrated by the magnificent Medici Court in Florence and those prestigious courts of an Eastern Europe. In Italy the Medici family had produced Popes and was well on the way to producing a Queen of France. But neither the Medici Popes nor Catherine de Medici, Queen of France, would be called saints.
THE ROOTS OF THE MEDICI
Previte Orton traces the roots of the Medici family’s wealth to their role as bankers for the Papacy, collecting the Pope’s revenues from the Church in England. For, though the sacrament of holy investiture bound individual clergymen and monks to poverty that was only in their personal capacity. All parts of the Church claimed an inalienable right to its revenues and its properties. So,for example, when members of the Franciscan Order of travelling friars finally tried to emulate the example of their inspiration, St. Francis of Assisi, they quickly got into trouble. Genuinely embracing poverty they were quite happy to perform for free services for which members of the laity were normally required to pay. Pressure from the Church establishment divided the “spiritualists” off from the rest, and once divided off they could be effectively suppressed.
But just as much of “a sure thing” as the revenues of the Papacy in Europe, when commerce and industry picked up, were the English wool crop and the demand for this “Golden Fleece” in the textile towns of Flanders and Tuscany. So the Medici cleverly used the Pope’s revenues in England to buy up English wool. Sacks of wool were less vulnerable in transit than gold coins and, moreover, as English East India merchants worked out in the eighteenth century, very little ‘added-value’ is achieved by moving bullion across vast distances. English wool, on the other hand, could be bought from the producers and sold to the manufacturers at a good profit. The purchase price was the Pope's money and the "value-added" was the Medici's income. And by the end of the twelfth century people were trading in “Futures” with the great Cistercian monasteries of Yorkshire able to sell their wool crop ten years in advance.
THE RE-EMERGENCE OF THE CITY
Meanwhile in the regions, where the wool was turned into textiles, urban capitalist society began to emerge. And even the smaller market towns that were springing up all over the place, including those founded by German pioneers in the “wild east”, had the effect of making towns disproportionately important in the conduct of affairs. Towns by definition meant trading goods and that meant making money.
In England the early growth of the Parliamentary system with its borough and county MP’s reveals the closer relationship between the borough representatives and the Crown than the county ones. The boroughs were always looking out for new ways to create wealth, and were prepared to pay the Crown for new legal rights and charters either as direct fees or in new forms of taxation. If small market towns and ports, however, could supply a regular flow of money, the centre of a great industry like Florence at the heart of the Tuscan textile trade could produce families like the Medici with vast sums of money that they could lend to monarchs, and would-be monarchs, in spite of the Usury Laws that theoretically banned the charging of interest.
With the increasingly important role played by money, what and who it could buy, there was a shift away from qualitative difference. For, though you pay more for “top quality”, unless that difference in quality can be quantified, it becomes irrelevant. How much for regal, majestic, noble, heroic, pious or divine?
As Sir Robert Walpole was to say much later-“Every man has his price”, and the market economy does not really deal with quality except to link it with quantity. Top quality costs you more of the same. Moreover, a market works through ‘cash on delivery’, which means that both parties have to identify tangible targets and goals. And, if there were those who declined to abandon intangible ideas like virtue, honour, and brotherhood, there were others more versed in ‘the ways of the world’. So, for example, the Hundred Years War between France and England, and the frequent wars between the Italian city-states, increasingly involved professional units of soldiers, who were prepared to fight for any cause for material gain. And when there was no fighting employment the mercenaries looted and terrorised regions, a favourite haunt being the attractive region around Avignon. In Italy Lodovico Sforza of Milan became the most famous of the “condottieri”, a general with his own army for hire, and rich and famous enough for Leonardo da Vinci to write to him asking to be hired as a universal genius able to do anything as well as any man- works of art, weapons of war, carnivals and festivals, feats of engineering.
SEEDS OF REVOLT
Even those elective processes, in which some qualitative considerations of character and potential could or should come into the equation, became distorted by access to wealth. When Martin Luther launched his attack on Tetzel’s sale of indulgences in 1517, probably everyone who understood how the Church worked in those days guessed that a good proportion of the money was not going to help in the building of a new St. Peter’s in Rome at all. A north German bishop, who had only recently been appointed, needed to pay back the bankers who had funded his campaign to get this lucrative position. It would be lucrative that is after he had given the first year’s income to the Pope. But Church revenues were still pretty reliable and could be banked upon.
Other “great expectations” against which people borrowed money were, however, more risky and financiers had to learn the new trade. Hence there was a great crisis in Florence between 1343 and 1346 when the banking houses of Bardi, Peruzzi, and others failed because Edward III of England, having borrowed heavily to pay for his campaigns to win the French throne, repudiated his debts with them totalling almost £450,000. As a result there was a stoppage of production and unemployment in Florence, which may have weakened the city because, when the Black Death arrived a couple of years later, it carried off nearly two thirds of the population,about twice the overall European mortality rate for this first outbreak of the plague. And the results were to lead to a major crisis.
As happened in many countries, after so many workers had died of the plague, the authorities in Florence tried to resist the operation of Supply and Demand, which under free market conditions would have raised wage levels. There were strikes and outbreaks of violence that culminated in June-July 1378, when the lowest level of workers, “the ragbags”, took over the city, robbing and burning for three days. They set up three new guilds to represent their interests alongside the other guilds in the ‘Signoria’, a body that had been created in 1343 as a form of municipal democracy. But the traders just shut up their shops in self-protection and eventually the revolution collapsed when “the ragbags” faced starvation.
“During the next forty years the Florence of the guilds gradually became the Florence of the Medici. The forms remained and a kind of republic existed but it must be understood that the proletariat, although it shared in the great prosperity of Tuscany, had not improved its political or constitutional position in the slightest degree. From 1402, or perhaps more precisely from 1434, the history of Florence for almost a century is the history of the benevolent despotism of the Medici family.” (page 233)
BENEVOLENT DESPOTISM
In 1963 the experience of moving on from abortive revolution by “the ragbags” to the gay serenity, festivity and self-congratulation of Medici Florence had relevance to the lessons that Western politicians had drawn from the Age of Catastrophe 1914-45, with its the revival of the Age of Revolution.
In his 1965 volume "Bismarck and Modern Germany" W.N. Medlicott referred to the Iron Chancellor's pioneering steps towards a Welfare State as "Benevolent despotism", for Bismarck was no politician but a minister of the Crown within a State system in which parliaments had no power. It seemed that sharing in great prosperity and a sense of being carried along a "tide in the affairs of man" was more important to “ragbags” than improving their political and constitutional position by means of Right Wing or Left Wing revolution.
The Marshall Plan had summed up the policy to be applied to European Reconstruction. It was not aimed at any political ideology, and hence could avoid confrontation and argument with ideologues. The first task was to just make sure that the material needs of the masses were looked after. And, in the aftermath of wartime unity, wealth deployed in “benevolent despotism” would be enough to defuse the smouldering discontent of the "proletariat".
And it worked domestically and internationally. For, after the death of Stalin, the Cold War thawed and the USSR, the leader of the global Communist movement, accepted peaceful co-existence and competition between Capitalist West and Communist East. But in some ways it was a competition between two ideals- a Western ‘quantity of life’ that was available right now and a Communist ‘quality of life’ in some distant future. But benevolent despotism meant that the Western citizen could "Live now. Pay later" enjoying the credit-worthy status of citizens legally entitled to simple rights within conditions of benevolent despotism.
During the Fifties a post-war USA showed the world a “Happy Days” shop window of what American culture had to offer even the common man compared to the wild communist dreams of creating a higher, nobler and altruistic form of Civilization, most notably through the output of Hollywood and the new TV studios.
But was it enough? The 1961 feature film “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”, in which Audrey Hepburn played a young woman addicted to window shopping at the exclusive New York jewellery shop, touched a real nerve with the public. Somehow in “A Nun’s Story” the idea of such a beautiful young woman renouncing the world in order to enter a closed order had seemed tragic. But the desperate levity of Miss Golightly had its own tragic sense of flight and fantasy in a shallow and mercenary big city environment. “We’re heading for the same rainbow’s end.. Waiting round the bend..My Huckleberry friend, Moon River and me”.
BRIGHT LIGHTS BIG CITY- CELESTIAL OR BESTIAL
In his 1969 TV series “Civilisation” Kenneth Clark chose scenes of New York to introduce his final chapter on “Heroic Materialism”: “It’s godless, it’s brutal, it’s violent- but one can’t laugh it off, because in the energy, strength of will and mental grasp that have gone to make New York, materialism has transcended itself…It took almost the same time to reach its present condition as it did to complete the Gothic cathedrals…So many of the same human ingredients have gone into its construction that at a distance it does look rather like a celestial city. At a distance. Come closer and it’s not so good. Lots of squalor, and, in the luxury, something parasitical”. (page 219)
The city had come a long way from the age of stone castles and churches in the secure shadow of which towns and cities grew surrounded by the strong and silent walls that gave a sense of protection and the possibility of imposing Christian Civilization within at least this space. Kenneth Clark’s New York is a triumphant attempt to house and contain human activity in all its best and worst forms, for, as Lord Clark said, nature is violent and brutal, and the nearby Ellis Island was established as a receiving station for the flotsam and jetsam of the Old World coming to the New World to pursue the American Dream of a new start.
So the city became just a great melting pot container from which some of the successful might eventually emerge to go to set up home in some suburban land of “Little Boxes”. In a way it was an Anglo-Saxon dream of a land where there was no need for monarchs, or nobles or an established Church and where legitimacy and wealth were potentially part of those “inalienable rights” that came from “the Creator” and were not man made at all.
For it was in England that the circumstances had been most favourable for the effective marriage of legitimacy and wealth, and they had created what felt like “a tide in the affairs of man” that had swept Great Britain towards world domination.
Thanks to the constitutional tradition that included the Coronation Oath, the Magna Carta and the Westminster Parliament, it was in England that the tendency for despotic monarchy to develop into absolute monarchy and Divine Right was checked by the traditions of the rights of the people and the duties of the Crown. And the “the Eleven Years Tyranny” of Charles I showed that, while Kings who acted as if they were above the law were very detrimental to the kind of legitimacy and security that bankers look for, the Parliamentarians knew that eventually the King would need them and their cooperation in providing money.
It was the Glorious Bloodless Revolution of 1688-9 that showed a real balance of power had been established between Crown and Parliament. Moreover, it made it very apparent that the real legitimacy of the monarch came from the approval of Parliament, which thereby was really bound to provide the funds that the chosen monarchs needed to do their job. ‘Their’ for in this case there was the kind of pragmatic compromise with which English government came to be associated. In 1688-9 Parliament and the prospective monarchs decided on a certainly rare if not unique enthronement of a joint King and Queen. Perhaps part of the success of the whole venture came from the fact that William of Orange, who became William III of England, brought with him the fruits of the Dutch tradition of elective monarchy since, in his native United Netherlands, he had been chosen to be the “Stadholder” in the country that had pioneered a new era of global trade and finance and some of this expertise flowed into England with him.
Shortly after the revolution the Bank of England was set up with the beginnings of the National Debt that was to prove vitally important as William brought England into his Grand Alliance against the Grand Design of Louis XIV to make himself master of Europe. Lending money to a King of England was now low risk and therefore low interest. Lending money to the absolutist French monarch was neither. And in the ongoing wars between the two countries the better financial situation of the British Crown was to prove vitally important, with the financial instutions of the City of London and the port of London launched on the trajectory that made London the entrepot of the global economy by the end of the Nineteenth Century.
THE OUTREACH OF LEGITIMACY AND WEALTH
Meanwhile the English nobility had already achieved a new level of legitimacy and security. When the Civil War and Commonwealth removed the King, the feudal overlord, all the feudal ties to the King fell into abeyance. Then, when the Crown was restored, these feudal tenures direct from the Crown were not restored. The nobility now held their estates freehold with the right to dispose of them at will, with whatever elective element that had been a factor in aristocratic succession now removed.
It was to take 200 years or so for the process of then undoing all the lower levels of feudal ties downwards from the former “tenants in chief” to be completed. But nevertheless very soon England saw the consequences of a situation in which landowners could sell their ‘real estate’ or even better use it as collateral for loans from the country banks that sprang up all over the country in the eighteenth century. Rather differently to Lorenzo Medici, labelled “the Magnificent”, they began the remodelling of England by means of investment and improvement so that England was transformed into a very English “work of art”.
As more than one foreign observer noted, the whole of England became like a pretty garden, with the kind of scenes that continue to charm foreign tourists and those who just experience that charm vicariously through mansion house dramas like the ever popular screen adaptations of the works of Jane Austen and Agatha Christie. Each of those English lady novelists of enduring popularity, however, brings out the way that questions of legitimacy, ownership, property and wealth came to assume such an apparently vice-like grip on people’s lives that sometimes only really desperate measures seemed to offer a way out, in the case of Agatha Christie usually murder.
The vice-like grip was a historical reality. In the late eighteenth century the long tragedy of the handloom weavers began in the Indian cotton industry. The popularity of Indian cotton goods in Britain and Europe had initially been good for the Bengal cotton industry, and in spite of British restrictions on the import of cotton cloth, Europe was still a good import market for “muslin”. Over time, however, the market price of cotton goods declined and the Indian weavers found themselves with legally binding contracts that obliged them to work for the East India Company for impossibly low wages. Allegedly the desperate way-out that was taken by some weavers was to cut off their thumbs in order to make weaving a physical impossibility. Fifty years later it was British handloom weavers who suffered from the gradual triumph of the power loom.
Perhaps in that era of the increasing extension of the idea of unrestricted rights of ownership and binding legitimacy the most shocking legal judgement was that of Lord Chief Justice Mansfield in the “Zong” affair, when he said that, “though it shocks one to have to say it”, according to the terms of the contract between the Zong’s owners and their insurers, the ship’s captain had a legal right to treat the slaves on board as if they were horses, and therefore to throw them into the Atlantic to drown. In law the insurers had to pay up according to their contractual obligations.
The verdict in the ‘Zong’ affair created a new phase in Britain’s relationship with legitimacy, for the public outrage inspired the Anti-Slave trade campaign. For the first time a campaign deliberately strove to foster widespread moral indignation amongst the reading public in order to bring about a change the law. And during the nineteenth century legitimacy and the power of Parliament to make new laws binding on all citizens gradually became a major focus of political life, and increasingly the preferred way to change things by employing the coercive powers of the State to impose new laws and to raise new taxes.
STATE AND SOCIETY- MARRIAGE OR COHABITATION
In his “Principles of Social and Political Theory” published in 1951 Sir Ernest Barker wrote: “The State employs the method of coercion or compulsion: its purpose of declaring and enforcing a scheme of law and order makes the method necessary: and the unity of its organization makes the method possible. Society uses the method of voluntary action and the process of persuasion: the nature of its purposes can be satisfied, and is best satisfied, by that method; and the multiplicity of its organization, which enables men to choose and relinquish freely their membership of its various groups, enables them also to escape coercion by any group should coercion be attempted”. (page 43- 44)
He went on: “Distinctions of thought are always clearer than differences of fact. In fact, and in actual life, there is always a ‘margin of imprecision’. The State, if it is coercive, has also a voluntary aspect, at any rate under a democratic system of government by virtue of which each citizen lays his mind alongside other minds in a voluntary process of common debate and mutual persuasion. Conversely, social groups, though voluntary in their nature, may assume coercive power, as churches no less than trade unions have done in the course of history.” (page 44)
It seemed logical to Professor Barker, however, to assert that in general: “it may be argued [that] there must have been society of some sort-some voluntary habit of living together and ‘sticking together’- before men could develop a system of conscious self-organization in terms of law. From this point of view Society is anterior to the State: the naturally given fact of Society precedes, if it does not produce, the consciously created fact of the State.” (page 48)
And Dorothy Whitelock’s volume 2 of “The Pelican History of England”, entitled “The Beginnings of English Society” develops the idea that in England people were conscious of being part of a Society before they became part of a State. So Professor Barker could go on to argue that- “In England, at any rate, the interaction [of State and Society] has been mutually beneficial; and in particular the presence of a settled State, which we have enjoyed since the Revolution of 1688 (and even that was an agreed transaction rather than a ‘revolution’), has been favourable, on the whole, to the existence and action of voluntary social formations, ranging from voluntary hospitals, voluntary educational societies, and voluntary companies (whether or no they are called companies) such as Lloyd’s and the Stock Exchange, to free churches, trade unions, and even political parties..” (page 49)
But in a very real way these developments were made possible by the way that this “settled State” proved conducive to the secure and clear ownership of legal rights to property and wealth and the way that consequently “progress” had assumed a natural tendency to accentuate those advantages.
In 1807, in the midst of the Napoleonic War, when Britain was undergoing English ‘revolutionary’ change in order to hold off and defeat the greatest-ever threat from France, Parliament gave urgent consideration to the question of Poor Law Reform. And Samuel Whitbread made a number of proposals including giving extra voting power in vestry meetings, probably the most important place for “common debate” about the lives of the common people. Whitbread proposed that those assessed at £100 should have two votes, those at £150 three votes, and those at £400 four votes. As a journalist and pamphleteer William Cobbett attacked the proposals in his ‘Political Register’:
“Many of those who pay rates are but a step or two from pauperism themselves and they are the most likely persons to consider duly the important duty of doing, in the case of relief, what they would be done unto.. Besides, as the law now stands, though every parishioner has a vote in vestry, must it not be evident, to every man who reflects, that a man of large property and superior understanding will have weight in proportion? That he will, in fact, have many votes? If he play the tyrant, even little men will rise against him, and it is right they should have the power so doing: but, while he conducts himself with moderation and humanity, while he behaves as he ought to do to those who are beneath him in point of property, there is no fear but he will have a sufficiency of weight at every vestry. The votes of the inferior persons in the parish are, in reality dormant, unless in cases where some innovation, or some act of tyranny, is attempted. They are, like the sting of the bee, weapons merely of defence”. ( Quoted Hammonds ‘The Village Labourer “ Vol I page 178)
In 1818, however, an Act was passed giving an extra vote for every ratepayer worth £50, and additional votes for each additional £25. The next year another law gave parishes the right to appoint a Select Vestry with powers to direct just how the local overseer should implement the poor law, and in these hard times this was very often done with a view to keeping costs and rates as low as possible. For these were hard times of post-war depression reflected in much lower values compared to Whitbread’s suggestions in 1807.
The dramatic depth of the post-war economic depression was especially severe in agriculture generally and in industrial Lancashire both of which had enjoyed boom times during the war. In 1815, faced with the prospect of renewed imports of cereals, Parliament passed the Corn Laws to limit imports and the collapse of English agriculture. This measure came to be seen as Cobbett’s ‘men of property and superior understanding’ using the powers of Parliament in a self-interested way, and moreover peacetime had brought cruel repression by the State through new legislation that violated an English tradition of ‘sticking together’. In many ways this 1815-21 period proved to be “The Making of the Working Class” and, when the Great Reform Act of 1832 took away the votes of the common man in those rare ‘popular boroughs’ of England and introduced a new systematic right to vote linked to property ownership, it heralded “The Triumph of the Middle Classes”.
GREAT BRITAIN- A MARRIAGE MADE ON EARTH
But then, as Kenneth Clark said, even nature was being seen as violent and brutal, and by this time just about all men of property had acknowledged the need to pursue “superior understanding” of those “laws of nature” that, as Florence Nightingale was later to explain in a work written to enlighten the misguided artisans of England, seemed to be everywhere and were the best proof that there could be of a great law giver. God’s laws rather than popular opinions and old-fashioned English common sense were to guide the new age.
The "benevolent despotism" of Medici Florence was just one part of a Europe of despotic monarchies, including the Papacy, by Dr. Orton's classification. The struggle for world or European domination by Spain and then France had been resisted by England, but in the struggle England had evolved from the Anglo-Saxon Society/State into just part of Great Britain, a region with no social coherence.
In many ways the key moment had been the end of the Seven Years War in 1763 with the recently crowned George III heading a government with unprecedented global responsibilities from North America to the Indian sub-continent. It was a challenging situation which almost two decades later made Parliament pass Dunning's resolution that "The influence of the Crown has increased, is increasing and ought to be diminished".
By then the British Crown was fighting a losing battle against the American colonists who used the emerging concepts of inalienable rights, that is a legitimacy higher than that of the Crown. But by the same token it was higher than the common people and could equally be used to justify despotic rule like that of Bismarck or later twentieth century totalitarian states.
For parallel with the work of the experts in the laws of men, other experts had looked with fresh eyes and a developing scientific method at the works of Nature. They revealed that the whole of Creation too operated according to laws, with ignorance of the Nature’s law liable to produce catastrophic results. The challenge to Western Civilization, therefore, was to achieve a state of perfection in the laws of men so that Humankind might profit from the bounties inherent within the Natural order: for an understanding of the “laws of Nature” made it possible to navigate successfully through the challenges and changes of life.
So, for example, the industrial revolution during the French Wars of 1793-1815 was the triumphant period for the Boulton and Watt steam engine, inspired by a conversation between James Watt and Professor of Science at Greenock University about the laws of latent heat. Matthew Boulton, exclaimed that their firm sold what everyone wanted- “power”. Consequently the power-revolution based on fossil fuels was crucial in the process of either supplementing or replacing human skill, creativity, and muscle power with technology. But what were to be the implications of this added power for ordinary life and society?
In the midst of those wars Thomas Robert Malthus outlined the implication of the laws of mathematics that show that geometric progression is faster than arithmetical progression: and therefore using the wealth of the country in such a way as to promote population growth was the wrong message. In Nature populations have an inbuilt tendency to grow faster than their food supply, and, if not checked by “Moral Restraint”, inevitably “Natural Checks” will come into operation- the disasters of war, famine and disease. Consequently ‘Malthusianism’ had a great impact on the way that the newly empowered Middle Classes set out to navigate Britain away from Hard Times in the 1830’s. The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 ended the centuries old English tradition of Poor Relief and ‘sticking together’ despite the desperate campaigning of William Cobbett. But as The Times obituary commented a few years later, he was just one man, a lone voice, not joined to any interest or faction. Just, as G.K. Chesterton commented after the First World War, someone who campaigned for "the little man".
The whole initial era of Middle Class empowerment after 1832 has been called “the age of laissez-faire” because there was a great emphasis on reducing the level of State intervention and reducing costs as far as possible. Thus Beatrice Webb, one of the great architects of the Welfare State, recalled how, as a daughter being trained to be able to deal with domestic staff and tradesmen, it was drilled into her by her mother that you should always know the market price and never pay any more than that. To do so was not even a kindness because it weakened the servants and tradesmen’s ability to cope with the real world. It was an environment in which Darwin’s laws of progress through evolution saw the way ahead as being shaped by a brutal struggle for ‘the Survival of the Fittest’, though it made very uncomfortable reading for those who liked to think of themselves as benign and Christian agents of a loving God. "This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you. But I do know best".
